My last day on Koh Lanta was excellent, first off I went to a Thai Cookery school that I'd spotted whilst out driving around the island on my scooter the day before.
The kitchen looked really nice and the guy that ran it was superb. An added bonus was that it was only two people on the course that morning, myself and a top geezer called Mark who lives in the Czech Republic and is originally from Southampton.
We chose five dishes to make together, which were Tom Yam with seafood (Spicy Thai soup, yum!), Vegetables in oyster sauce, Chicken with cashew nut, Green curry and Pad Thai. The school provides fresh ingredients, bought that morning and all the kit of course. The cooking is all in the preparation, as once that is done the food is ready in a few minutes! (Even the green curry!)
It was really enjoyable and we obviously tried all the food too... to the point of feeling pretty stuffed, lol! I got the ingredients for the pad thai sauce and the green curry paste, so I can try and rustle those up when I get home, although you can buy the green curry paste I'm sure.
At the end of the course we got our photo with Aon, the chef and picked up our certificates to go with our own hand written recipe and preparation books. I arranged to go to the caves in the afternoon with Mark and went off to chill for a bit back at the resort.
I rode down the dusty road to the caves about 15 mins before we were going to meet there and Mark arrived shortly afterwards... we paid for our tour and got given our 'equipment', a headlamp! During the walk up to the cave (through some nice jungle) Mark and I were chatting, carrying on from this morning, when we discovered that we both play poker. It turns out that he is in the enviable position (after working bloody hard to get there) of being able to follow the EPT and some worldwise poker circuits and play in the side games and satellites to the main events with some success. Having spoken about the game and heard some of his stories, its clear that he'll be cashing in a major tourney before long, and will deserve it too!
Our discussion didn't detract from the cave visit, but I think it pissed the tour guide off a bit, although he had a big German chap with his Thai 'missus' to talk to anyway.
The cave was awesome, nothing like I expected it to be... I imagined we'd walk into a big cave, do some ooh-ing and aah-ing and walk back out, but we went through quite a large section with some pretty tight and slippery bits and through several larger chambers. The end of the trip was the best bit, where we had a small hole to crawl through. Both Mark and I had freshly laundered clothes on, neither of us expecting too much dirt!! We had to slide through this part on on stomach's and got filthy... t'was funny! The other side of this was the best cave yet, as it was full of bats. It was near the exit, so the guide and the others went on out, and we stayed in the cave with the bats and had them flying all around us whilst I tried to get some photo's of them in flight (not easy!).
Once we'd finished we agreed to meet up for some beers later and went our seperate ways to get cleaned up!
That night was excellent, and it was a shame I had such an early start the next day to leave for Bangkok, cos I'd have liked to go on for a late one... never mind it was still good and we had a good waffle about stuff and it was a pleasure to get some positive feedback from someone who I gained an instant respect for about my travels and thoughts at this point in time! I hope to keep in touch with Mark and hopefully we can meet somewhere else one day. As seems usual, the unplanned and chance meetings are still turning out to be the best...
The next morning I was up early an headed off to Bangkok. It took the best part of the day and was fairly dull... plus when I got to the area I wanted to stay, the one main street full of back packers places was completely bloody full! So once again I'm paying more than I wanted to stay somewhere I didn't want too... bah! Oh well... off to Australia in a couple of days, so sod it!
Koh Lanta was very nice, I'll definitely go back there for a few days on my next visit to Thailand. Hope Mark enjoys the remainder of his break there...
Photo's are on Photobucket
